Darpa Dodges Obama Budget Death Ray, Keeps Its $2.8 Billion

Darpa Director Regina Dugan. Photo: Flickr/CSUFNewsPhotos

For most of the U.S. military’s far-flung community of scientists and engineers, Monday was a day to pop a Xanax. Not only did the Defense Department announce a cut of more than $2 billion from is research and development budget for next year, but the Pentagon also said it would slow down production of new ships, spy drones, stealth jets, and combat vehicles — leaving a military that’s a bit creakier and older than before, and threatening the funding of thousands in the slide-rule set. Gulp.

But at the Virginia headquarters of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s blue sky (and best-known) science and technology shop, there was no need for anxiety meds. Its $2.8 billion budget was cut a mere $1.4 million dollars — less than a half-percentage point drop. Given the fiscal climate in Washington today, that’s a downright soothing number. And it means you can look forward to a year of superfast missiles, living factories, and military-grade cloud computing.

Most importantly, perhaps, Darpa locked in perfectly with a White House that has put technological innovation as a key to America’s economic recovery.

“I wasn’t in on the end game negotiations, but I did advocate for preserving R&D/S&T department/government wide in a economic down turn,” says Gen. James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who now chairs the defense policy studies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The reasoning being we will need all the competitive advantage we can muster. The Administration was on board with this and fairly explicit in their support of labs and innovation organizations, the best of which they [the Administration] believe is Darpa.”

Dugan has also reined in some of Darpa’s more free-wheeling tendencies by streamlining the number of projects the agency pursues. In fiscal year 2011, Darpa oversaw 230 separate R&D programs. For 2013, that figure will drop by more than a quarter, to 169.

Research priorities are changing, too. A $52-million-per-year effort to investigate “machine intelligence” has been eliminated. An unspecified “classified” initiative was cut from $107 million to $3 million.

According to the budget that the agency released Monday, Darpa plans new programs to make computing clouds secure enough for the Pentagon. (There’s that cyber defense again.) It will investigate ways to peer into underground lairs using “acoustic, seismic, electromagnetic, chemical, resistivity, conductivity, lidar, multi/hyperspectral, and gravity/gravity gradient” sensors. (Watch out, Iran.) And the agency will try to create the building blocks for “Living Foundries” — “a revolutionary, biologically based manufacturing platform … leveraging biology to solve challenges associated with production of new materials, novel capabilities, fuels and medicines.”

Sure, the idea of a factory that’s alive seems far out, even a little creepy. But it also sounds like a good fit for a “Halftime America” that’s suddenly seeing some of its dormant factories spring back to life.